Quoted in The Nation article by Michelle Goldberg on 16 July 201

To read the entire article, “Yes, Mr. President, the Border Kids are Refugees,” at this link: http://www.thenation.com/article/180682/our-refugee-crisis .

‘“The United States has chosen to fight a ‘war on drugs,’ which has consisted of trying to break apart large cartels,” says Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright fellow in El Salvador who works with child migrants. “There’s evidence that in breaking apart the cartels, you actually increase the violence for people living in those communities.” With the demand for drugs still ravenous, smaller groups emerge to fill that demand, warring with each other and setting up in new countries. “When we fought the war on drugs in Colombia, the cartels moved into Mexico with greater force, and crop growth moved into Ecuador and Peru,” Kennedy says. “And now we’re seeing that they’re moving to the Caribbean and Central America.” In Honduras, the problem has been exacerbated by the 2009 right-wing military coup, which, as the International Crisis Group writes in a recent report, “weakened already fragile institutions of law enforcement and justice.”

In countries where the cartels are most active, children reaching adolescence face a choice between gang membership and death. Kennedy recently wrote a report for the Immigration Policy Center, “No Childhood Here: Why Central American Children Are Fleeing Their Homes,” which notes that 59 percent of Salvadoran boys and 61 percent of Salvadoran girls list crime or violence as a reason they decided to make the perilous trip north.

…

Despite the right’s canard that kids are fleeing to the United States because they think Obama has promised them amnesty, Kennedy says that only one of the more than 400 kids she has interviewed knew anything about the Dream Act or the president’s 2012 executive order halting deportation of some young immigrants. …

Greater border enforcement is not going to stop desperate parents from trying to get their kids out of imminent danger. Migrants know they’re likely to be deported, and many reach the United States only after multiple failed attempts. “Many children say, ‘It’s a sure death if I stay, and it’s a possible death if I go,’” says Kennedy.’